


Con Limon Y Sal

by Lacinia



Category: Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-31
Updated: 2013-01-31
Packaged: 2017-11-27 16:00:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/663868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lacinia/pseuds/Lacinia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It starts like this—</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from “Limon Y Sal” by Julieta Venegas, which is a great song for Natasha and Bruce. It’s about taking people just as they are, even if they desaparece y no dice nada romantico. Or transform into a monster, like in the music video ;) Thanks for beta’ing go to Bees, who also puts up with my whining, sudden attacks of the feels, penchant for tragic AUs, and inability to abide by a deadline. And finally, I have to point out that there will be some inconsistencies with the movie, for which I have no better excuse than the fact that I plotted this fic before it came out (yes, I really am that slow of a writer). They are minor and hopefully will not detract from your enjoyment.

It starts like this—under the hot tropical sun.  Natasha is wearing a wide-brimmed hat and oversized sunglasses; her pale skin all but glows in the bright light.  She is not trying to be subtle.

Banner’s eyes go wide when he sees her, Natasha can see that all the way from across the town square.  He visibly fights the instinct to rabbit, acknowledging the uselessness of that course of action.  Instead, he walks over and sits down across the table from her.  She looks cool and poised despite the weather, dressed in a sleeveless cotton dress, yellow with bright dapples of printed orange flowers.  Bruce, on the over hand, feels sticky and rumpled in his long-suffering suit.  He’s hyperaware of the droplets of sweat gathering on the back of his neck.

“You’re not from around here,” he says in English.  She had expected more of a reaction from him, but it looks like this ‘vacation’ has been good for him. 

“They said you were smart, Dr. Banner,” she says, and hands him the second glass of ice water, its surface slick with condensation. 

“‘They’?” is all he says.

“I’m with the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division.”

“Ah.  SHIELD.  That must make you Agent Romanov, then.  They tell stories about you.”

“You have good intelligence,” she says approvingly.  “Who’s ‘they’?” she asks, although she doesn’t hold much hope that he’ll give up his contacts that easily.  He’s a civilian, not a moron.

“Why are you here?” he deflects.

“Not to threaten,” she says, and waves a hand at the people milling about.  The town is a tiny place, but there are far, far more people about than she would risk.  “Just to talk.”

He leans back in his chair, like he has nothing to fear.  While this is more or less the truth—he is so very hard to kill—it is an act, and not a particularly convincing one.  “So talk.”

“SHIELD knows about your trouble with the Army.  We are here to offer you an alternative.  No more running, no more fear.”

“No more freedom,” he counters.

“We’re not going to keep you in a cage, Dr. Banner.”

“Well, forgive me if I don’t have a lot of faith in my government.”

“I did,” she says.  “I had a lot of faith in my government.  I believed that they were always doing the right thing.  And SHIELD saved me from them,” she finishes, pulling down the v-neck of her dress to reveal the bullet scar an inch from her heart.  If she didn’t get that until two years after she escaped from the Red Room, well, what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him.

“Yeah, they sound great.  I bet they sell cookies, and everything.  Save the spiel, Agent.”

“Another time, then,” she says, pushing her sunglasses back up, watching Banner as he walks away.  “We’ll be around.”

 

 

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

 

The second time they meet takes place in another tiny, hot village.  Egypt, this time.  She wishes, if he insists on being this nomadic, that he could stay away from places that swelter even in autumn.

“What are you doing here?” he asks. 

“Oh, just checking up,” she answers.  “How do you like Ismailia?”

“There are a few too many government agents.”

“SHIELD doesn’t represent a government, Dr. Banner.”  She reminds him reproachfully.  “We’re concerned with more important things.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” he says, indifferently.  “Now if you’ll excuse me, Agent Romanov, I have a country to smuggle myself out of.”

“Don’t run too far,” she says.  “This place is beautiful in the spring.”

 

 

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

 

The third time they meet, it’s in the middle of the night.  Bam-bam-bam goes his door, the knock beating the rapid tempo of an emergency.  Bruce wakes up in an instant, and only pauses to grab his medical bag as he runs to the door. 

He doesn’t expect to see Agent Romanov when he answers the door.  Mostly because she doesn’t seem like the kind of person who knocks.  He’s also surprised to see her in her tac suit, which fails to make her appear more dangerous, but only because it makes her look like she’s no longer pretending. 

“We need to go,” she says.  Her face is still, but her eyes move rapidly, scanning the room and checking the windows. 

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” he says.

“There are five armed men approaching this building.  Unless you feel like seeing what happens when they get here, I suggest we leave now.”

“Just let me get my—.”  He stops speaking at a loud bang from downstairs, which Natasha recognizes as a door being kicked open.

“No time,” she says, voice and face still impassive.  “Hide, and stay calm.”

“What are you going to—,” he starts to ask, but she cuts him off.

“I’ll deal with it.  Just don’t get angry.”

He hides in the closet, which is a not particularly clever spot.  But he was rushed, and even as a child he was no good at hide-and-go-seek.  That corner of the apartment has some water damage, and the resulting warping has caused the closet door to fit only loosely, leaving a gap he can peer through.  Bruce was always too curious for his own good: he peeks.

Agent Romanov stands with her back against the wall, with the door on her right.  Her hands are open and her stance looks relaxed.  She hasn’t drawn the pistol holstered on her thigh.  Bruce’s chest is tight, crushed by the tension.  He can’t stop thinking about how the thin walls won’t stop bullets, or the fact that he’s surrounded by hundreds of innocents.

A bearded man kicks open the door and Bruce jumps.  He peers into the room, seeming surprised to see it empty.  He says something with a laugh to his comrades behind him.  ‘Deep sleeper,’ Bruce realizes after a moment.  Under stress, Bruce has discovered, his language skills are among the first to disappear.  The man steps through the threshold, gun held before him, and Agent Romanov disarms him with a disconcertingly swift twist of her hand, audibly breaking at least two bones.  By the time he’s started to scream she’s already attacking the man behind him.  She steps into the hall, and Bruce’s view is cut off, leaving him to listen to the sounds of violence and frantically imagine what must be occurring.  A man falls, the upper part of his body framed by the open door.  Bloody nose, Bruce notices.  And the slack face of the recently fallen unconscious.  There are a few, scattered gunshots.  The bearded man swears and picks up his fallen gun left-handed.  Bruce feels his heart rate ratchet up and has to push it down, but the man only ( _only?!_ ) goes into the hall to join the fray.  A moment later, he falls back into view just in time for Bruce to see him get kicked in the face and the gut, one right after the other.  Agent Romanov steps into view and crouches to deliver a single, vicious blow to the head that knocks the man unconscious.

She rises slowly to a stand.  “How are you feeling, Dr. Banner?”

He opens the door.  “How am _I_ feeling?  How are you feeling?”

She gives him a smile that’s no more than a brief twitch of her lips.  “Satisfied.”  She resumes her serious expression.  It looks a bit robotic.  “Do you know who just tried to kill you?”

“I was hoping you would tell me,” he says, with genuine feeling.  The whole reason he’s so far from home is to avoid this sort of thing.

Her gaze drops down to the fallen men.  “Local organized crime,” she pronounces, then cocks her head at him.  “What did you do to piss them off?” 

Bruce thinks back to a few days ago, when he patched up a young man with bullet wounds none of the other doctors would touch.

Natasha sees understanding flicker across his face and shakes her head.  “It doesn’t matter.  Grab your things, we’re leaving.”

Involuntarily, he takes a step backwards.  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” he says.

“This city is no longer safe for you.  If you don’t leave, this is going to happen again, and I won’t always be here to rescue you.”  He doesn’t move a muscle, so she sighs, and adds, “I’m not trying to bring you in, just evacuate you.”

He laughs at her, a panicked sound.  “I don’t believe you.  For all I know, you staged this whole thing.”

She frowns at him.  “Banner, I need you to calm down,” she says.  It’s the same reasonable voice, but there’s a sharpness to it, an edge that almost suggests an emotion. 

(A few months later, in Calcutta, Bruce will test her, and find out that she is, in fact, afraid of him.  He accepts it with grace; he’s used to it.

She’s not.  The last time she was afraid of a person—ah, she must have been very young.  She knows what it is to fear what people may do, or what they may take from her, but to be afraid of a _person_ —that is novel.  People, in her experience, all die easily.)

Bruce notices his heart rate is up.  Fear will set him off as good as anger, some days, because when it comes to fight or flight he only has one of the above.

Bruce is afraid of SHIELD.  Afraid they will put him in a box he will never escape from, afraid they’ll push and push at him until he proves everyone was right about him.

Afraid of Agent Romanov, who, he suspects, could kill him so quickly even the Hulk could not save him. 

He takes a deep breath, forces himself to visibly relax.  Agent Romanov does not.  He suspects Agent Romanov never relaxes. 

“I am calm,” he says, and his voice isn’t even shaky.  “And I’ll leave the city.  The province, too.  But under my own power.”

“Fine,” she says finally.  She shadows him all the way to Aktau, then hands over the reins to a surveillance team.  Natasha writes in her report, as she has in every report thus far, that Banner is not yet ready.  He does not yet have sufficient control: his potential as a liability is greater than his potential as an ally. 

 

 

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

 

The fourth time they meet she is done giving him choices.  “We need your help, Dr. Banner,” she tells him.

“And if I say no?” he asks.

“I’ll convince you,” she promises, but even the smile she offers doesn’t take the teeth from the threat.

 

 

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

 

After this, Bruce stops counting.  He resigns himself to the fact that SHIELD has him well and truly in hand.  Agent Romanov’s disquieting presence simply becomes a fact of his life. 

Here is what Bruce thinks about her: Agent Romanov is a government drone.  Agent Romanov has no sense of humor.  She is not so much a person as she is an extension of the organization she works for: SHIELD’s deadliest, most venomous claw.  And she is not his teammate; she will never, ever be his friend.

The two of them make a silent agreement, sometime between the battle in New York and when Fury officially designates them permanent members of the Avengers Initiative.  Everyone else will slide into camaraderie, and the two of them will watch each other, cool and wary.  They won’t trust each other, and they won’t particularly like each other, but they’ll work together.  She’s a professional, dammit, and he’s way too scary to be so easily intimidated, so they pigheadedly continue to pretend they aren’t bothered by each others’ presence.

As they fly out to their first real, planned mission, she turns around from the co-pilot’s chair and says “You saved Tony Stark’s life, and you tried to kill me.  What does that mean?”

He sighs.  “The other guy,” he begins.

“No,” she says.  “You.”

“Fine.”  His gaze slides away from her.  “It means that you’re SHIELD, Agent Romanov, and I don’t trust SHIELD.”

She considers this.  “Thank you for your honesty,” she says.  It is good to know exactly where she stands. 

Clint lifts his eyes from the altitude meter, silently asking her a question.  She shakes her head.  Bruce isn’t exactly easy with Clint, either, but at least he isn’t holding a grudge against him for a couple of years stalking him across the globe.  Plus, sooner or later Clint will unwind enough to be disliked for his personality, rather than the eagle on his chest. 

A little tension on the job she can handle.  She keeps her distance from the Hulk in battle, and she treats Bruce with cool respect.  The situation is slightly unpleasant, but she has it under control. 

 

 

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

 

A few months later they’re on the way back from Ukraine and Natasha realizes that the prickle of her awareness is not as bad as it used to be.  The attention she gives him is not so intense, the coating of fear does not feel so heavy.  She is, she realizes, becoming acclimated.

It is much the same with Bruce, who after seeing Natasha get her arm broken pulling a civilian out of harm’s way, after seeing her refuse to quit even when the numbers are stacked against her, after seeing her take a fucking _bullet_ finally gets that Natasha is not a robot in the shape of a woman.  Natasha is not mindlessly following orders.

Sometime between seeing Natasha disobey a direct order from Director Fury and watching her dance with exquisite delicacy, Bruce realizes that Natasha is not just a weapon. 

Sometime after laughing at one of Natasha’s jokes, sometime after remembering she hates banana peppers, sometime after she makes a face and takes the gun out of his hands he realizes he does trust her, and she has been his friend for a while.  

 

 

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

 

One day in November they’re in battle in Denver.  Natasha doesn’t like Colorado for several reasons, so it frankly pisses her off that this is the place they have to fight the mad scientist of the week.  This one is generic as they come.  His demands (political _and_ monetary, points for optimism) are unsurprising.  He’s just another unbalanced PhD with a toy dangerous enough to warrant their attention. In this case, it’s these weird bombs that provide concussive force, but no heat.  They’re scattered all around the plaza, and Natasha is sprinting across the square to get a kid out of the danger zone when—

There’s the sickening sense of gravity spinning as the explosion sends her gracelessly soaring towards the corner Starbucks.

Another reason for Natasha to hate Denver: she didn’t even see that one. 

She flies a good thirty feet, hits something that feels like a wall, and smacks her head on the asphalt when she falls.  Hard.  Hard enough, she knows from experience, that she’s probably going to pass out.  She blinks in a futile attempt to hold onto consciousness, and sees something large and looming and _green_. 

Блядь, Natasha thinks, and falls into blackness.

 

 

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

 

“Jesus,” Clint whispers.  The faint crackle in his voice tells her she’s hearing him over comms, which means she’s still in the field, which means she’s still in danger, which means she has to wake up.

Natasha tries to open her eyes.  It takes her a few tries, and when she does she sees—

Natasha snaps her eyes closed.

Of the many things she is, she is not a coward, so she takes a breath and opens them.  Above her she sees the Hulk’s face, hanging huge only inches from hers.

Clint is here, she thinks wildly, Clint can see me, Clint will—

Let’s be honest, she tells herself.  I’m too close, he doesn’t dare do anything. 

She tries to stay still, but has to turn her head to vomit.  Concussions are a bitch.  The Hulk makes a sound and pokes her gently on the side.  Natasha hisses; cracked ribs.  She waits a long moment, sick with suspense for his reaction, but he merely turns away, disinterested. 

Natasha closes her eyes, breathes. 

 

 

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

 

The Denver mission is a cakewalk, a blip on the record.  Other than Natasha, no civilians or SHIELD personnel suffered serious injuries.  She’s bashful about the whole thing: it was mostly her carelessness that she was hurt at all. 

The only reason that the day will stick out in their memory at all is that it becomes clear that Natasha has been included on the very short list of people who are more or less safe from the Hulk.  

Natasha has mixed feelings.  She does the prudent thing and takes advantage of it in battle, but she can’t pretend that she’s comfortable with him close, that she doesn’t tense up when he’s at her back, that she doesn’t look at him and fear.  But, in time, she finds she becomes just as accustomed to the Hulk as she did to Bruce.  He’s still unpredictable, but he seems to understand that she and Clint are so much more frangible that the other members of the team, and takes appropriate care. 

This works to allay the greatest of her misgivings, and so she stops expending so much energy to make sure they are on the opposite ends of their battles.  She finds he’s an excellent cover from gunfire; a few times he even takes out her opponents for her when she’s pinned down or outnumbered. 

She begins to do more than tolerate his presence: she relies on him, thinks of him as a teammate, feels relief when he shows up.

Life, Natasha knows, has a way of defying all expectations.  You find yourself doing things you would never have imagined: you abandon your country, you throw away your covert status.  You befriend a man SHIELD calls a Class A threat. 

Things change, even the things you think won’t.

She sees Bruce vulnerable and she no longer itches to put him in a cage, she sees the Hulk and she isn’t even afraid of him.  Bruce used to distrust Natasha so much his alter ego tried to smear her across a wall, and now, she finds, she trusts him with her life.


	2. Chapter 2

By the time that Natasha moved into Avengers Tower, every other member of the team had already started living there. Steve and Thor had been first, because their other options were pretty much limited to sterile SHIELD housing. Bruce had moved in next, lured by the world-class lab and the special containment on the seventieth floor. Clint was hard to convince, too used to a solitary life, but freedom from SHIELD regulations was a tempting thing. Also the twenty-four hour kitchen. 

Natasha, though, Natasha was tricky. Tony didn’t know how to convince Natasha. He didn’t understand, at all, what it was that she wanted. 

Fury pulled her aside. “You ever hear of unit cohesion?” he asked. “Do us all a favor and take Stark up on his offer.”

“That’s a big favor,” she said. She valued her privacy and the measure of anonymity she got from being just one of a hundred women in her mid-price apartment building. 

“You know I wouldn’t ask you if it weren’t important,” he said. She knew intellectually that the remainder of the Avengers would bond without her, that when they all share quarters she will become an outsider. She remembered how in her first year at SHIELD they forced companionship between her and Clint by leaving them alone in a safehouse for two months. Coulson is frustratingly resolute in his continued insistence that it was a legitimate mission. Still, for all that the two of them left that goddamned farm hating SHIELD’s inability to do anything by halves, the taste of pre-packaged meals, and French radio 104.4, she can’t deny that is was effective: she and Clint may have left that place sick of the sight of each other, but once they recovered they were friends, not just allies. 

“Fine,” she said, “if it’s for the team.” But it will be on her terms. 

Natasha does not so much move into Avengers Tower as begin sleeping there without telling anyone. 

One morning she is there, and everyone thinks, oh she must have crashed here last night. The next and they wonder if she was using the gym. On the third day, Tony discovers that someone had cut the security feeds for the sixty-sixth floor and deleted the automatic notification he’d been sent. As security breaches go, it’s childishly simple and brutally efficient. He suspects Natasha instantly, and tells her she’s welcome any time. That’s why he invited her straight off. 

“Three days is too slow,” she says, and he doesn’t see her in the tower for a week.

The second time she moves in he notices because Natasha left in his suite a glass jar filled with swollen, glossy black widow spiders. She keeps a terrarium filled with them on the nightstand by her bed, feeds them once a week with crickets she gets from the pet store around the corner from her building.

“That’s not fair,” Tony argues. “I gave you a keycard.”

“I’ve never used my keycard,” she says, and leaves him to figure that one out.

The next time she follows Bruce through the door leading to the restricted access elevator an alarm blares and the room seals itself off, leaving the two of them trapped inside. Tony feels smug about that, but when he goes to let them out finds only Bruce inside and a hole in the wall. 

“I didn’t feel like going out the way she did,” Bruce says with a shrug. They’re sixty-fifth floor. 

“You know, you could cut the guy a break,” Clint tells her later. 

“He gets smug,” she replies. “He thinks he’s invincible. And someday someone is going to die because of it.”

Four break-in attempts later, the security honestly stumps her. She moves in the next day. 

Natasha leaves all her furniture behind, bringing to the Tower only clothes and weapons. 

“I pack light, too,” Bruce says, when he sees her with just a duffel bag and a backpack. There’s a humorous quirk to his mouth—he’d arrived to the Tower with only the clothes on his back and three spiral-bound notebooks filled with strange diagrams and dense, spidery writing. He couldn’t wait to get the smell of SHIELD out of his hair.

“Never own anything you can’t leave behind,” Natasha says, and they exchange a quick smile, an acknowledgement between two people who have lived life on the run. 

Of course, just then, Clint, who actually did live on the run, albeit briefly and unsuccessfully, walks in holding what is possibly the skin of one of those Muppet-looking aliens they fought last week. 

“What is that,” she asks, without any intonation at all. 

“It’s a rug!” he replies, delighted. “I got it for free.”

“I’ll bet you did,” she answers poisonously. It’s hideous. It’ll make Stark have an aneurysm that something so ugly ever entered his home, without even the virtue of being expensive enough to make an Occupy Wall Street protester cry. 

Clint’s rooms are an absolute mess, with clothes on the floor and teetering piles of junk. Freed from strict SHIELD regulations for the first time in over a decade, he has reverted to habits more befitting of an unemployed twenties-something. Natasha is appalled, and gives his quarters a wide berth. 

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Living in the Avengers Tower is exactly as tiresome as Natasha had expected. Tony is a child. Thor has never learned to be quiet. Accidents in the labs happen with a disturbing regularity. Clint still doesn’t know how to respect a locked door. Steve is okay, Natasha grudgingly admits. 

It is also so much more of a relief than she had foreseen. She likes not worrying that someday work will follow her home and her civilian neighbors will get caught in the cross-fire. She like the team camaraderie, so different from working with most SHIELD agents. Her view of the Chrysler Building is lovely. 

Friendship, a kitchen that someone else stocks, sheets with a very high thread count: these are comforts she can very easily become accustomed to. There’s a lot to like about the Avenger Initiative. 

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

A few weeks after she moved in, Natasha finds herself eating breakfast with Bruce in the SHIELD mess hall because there was a fire in the common kitchen which everyone is steadfastly denying responsibility for. Bored, Natasha idly gazes through the glass wall that separates the seating area from the walkway overlooking the storage bay. When Coulson and Pepper Potts walk into view, deep in conversation, Natasha starts reading their lips, mostly for something to do while she sips her mediocre coffee, half out of curiosity. Coulson notices her looking and covers his mouth with a hand.

“They look friendly,” Bruce notices. Last week the two of them had had an argument that had left Pepper white-faced and with shaking hands. Coulson had reacted by locking the office door he usually leaves open. No one had seen him for the rest of the day. Afterwards SHIELD had had to renegotiate half of their Stark Industries contracts because the company had demanded higher pay.

She waits until Bruce takes a sip of coffee. “They’re sleeping together,” she says, and he gratifyingly spits it all over his newspaper. 

“How,” he starts to say in a strangled voice, but she just raises an eyebrow at him. It’s as obvious as the way they lean into each other’s space, un-self-conscious, as obvious as the familiar way they fight, as obvious as the way they look so smug, like they have a secret.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

February ends unseasonably warm. Everyone gratefully sets aside winter coats for sweaters and jackets, looks ahead to sunny days. Trips to the ocean.

The days are clear and chilly, and pass without the usual interruptions of Avengers missions. Thor adopts a kitten that follows him around with adoring eyes. Clint teaches Steve to juggle and Tony makes Natasha’s Widow’s Bite lighter and more powerful than before. And Bruce’s relationship with Betty Ross falls to pieces.

On the last Friday of the month, the lovely Dr. Ross emails every Avenger except for Bruce and politely asks if one of them would mind being in the next room while she visits Bruce the next day. 

Steve dutifully reports this to Coulson, who cancels all their appointments and meetings for the next day. It’s the night of one of their team dinner-and-movie dates, and the occasion is painfully stilted, everyone uncomfortably aware that they know something that Bruce does not. Bruce, sensing a secret poorly-kept, looks at them with puzzled eyes. The men guiltily duck his gaze, but Natasha looks back evenly, and reflects again on the drawbacks of becoming entangled in the lives of others.

The next day Betty visits and sits Bruce down on a couch ‘to talk.’ The rest of the team is crowded into the guest bedroom next door: geared-up, keyed-up, and ready to come through the wall if they have to. JARVIS is silently playing security footage on the flatscreen, and no one needs audio to recognize a break-up when they see one.

Bruce stands up angrily and Steve’s jaw sets. Clint sets an arrow to string. Thor spins his hammer, and Tony’s repulsors warm up. Natasha is still, and for once it is more like a stone and less like a snake waiting to strike. 

In the space between heartbeats Bruce Hulks out, and Thor tears through the wall like it’s tissue. In an instant, the team surrounds the Hulk, weapons pointed inward. Clint whisks Betty away, and Natasha notices, dispassionately, that she’s been crying. Clint reappears a moment later, still battle-ready. 

The team circles the Hulk carefully as he swallows big breaths and tightens his hands into fists. Steve is about to give the order to pounce when Natasha holds out a hand and says, “Wait.”

She’s proven right a second later, when the Hulk falls to the ground with a crash and starts loudly sobbing. Everyone relaxes, and in only a minute or two Bruce is back, disheveled and wet from the Hulk’s pear-sized tears. He looks miserable and ashamed, and everyone backs off, pretends that they didn’t know about how his life was going to change before he did, or they’d ever seen Bruce this vulnerable. Clint hands him a bathrobe, and motions that they should talk outside. 

There’s a hushed argument in the corridor. Steve thinks they should stay; that’s what a friend would do. Tony offers that what a friend would really do is get Bruce horribly, disgustingly drunk and then call Dr. Foster and ask her if she has any more female science friends. 

Tony is voted out of the conversation, and the remainder of the debate is torn between Thor and Steve’s call for a demonstration of group support, and Clint’s very vocal assertion that men that men of the twenty-first century do not sit around with their male friends and talk about ugly breakups. “No, we’re going to go back to our rooms, forget this happened, and tonight drink a couple beers and watch a football game with him,” he says. 

Natasha sighs. “Leave,” she says. “I’ll handle this.” Everyone else scrambles away, making a spectrum from ‘Are you sure’ (Steve) to ‘Oh thank god’ (Tony). 

Natasha steps out a beat after they do, but she’s back in the room a minute later, with a shirt and a pair of pants in one hand and an ice-cold bottle of vodka in the other. She tosses the clothes to Bruce.

“Thanks,” he says, slowly pulling them on, and doesn’t quite manage to hide the fact that it’s not only the Hulk that’s been crying.

Natasha fishes out two tumblers from a cabinet. It’s a benefit of living in Stark’s house that glasses are never far away, although he’s taken to hiding the good booze. She doesn’t say a word, just plunks one down and fills it with approximately too much vodka. She pours herself an equal measure, clinks their glasses together, and takes a long drink. 

Their glasses are empty and she’s contemplating the sweating bottle with a look of intense concentration when she says, still staring at the label like it has personally offended her, “You know, a couple of years ago I broke up with this guy, and it was pretty messy.” Guns may have been drawn. “At the time, it felt like the worst mistake I’d ever made. Like I’d thrown away my last shot.”

“Why’d you do it, then?” he interrupts.

She looks up, surprised. “Because it wasn’t a mistake,” she says. “It was the right thing to do. For both of us.” That’s not very comforting, she realizes, so she adds, “My point is, even when you think someone is everything you have, you bounce back.”

“Yeah? Did your guy cry?” he asks, with a pained grin that fails at wryness. 

“He shot a Hydra agent in the leg,” she says, matter-of-fact.

Bruce can’t think of a good response to that, except to wonder about the kind of guy Natasha used to date. He decides silence is the wiser course, so he doesn’t say anything. But it’s not an unfriendly silence, and he is deeply grateful that Natasha is here with him. Tony is a better person than most people think, and Thor is Bruce’s number one choice to have on his side in a fight, and Steve is the kind of good that makes your bones hurt, and Clint is so steady you don’t even have to worry that there’s a sniper with your head in his sights, but Natasha is the one that stays with him, and doesn’t ask for a thing. Natasha sits with him for a long time, and doesn’t mind that Bruce is falling apart. She doesn’t shy from his sadness or require from him false cheer, or ask for the whole sad story of how he and Betty fell out of love. 

It means something to him.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

The Avengers have settled into a rhythm. They know each others’ strengths and weaknesses and favorite tactics, and they operate with an elegant synchrony.

Most days.

But the Hulk, by his nature, is unpredictable. Bruce makes progress, but there are always backwards steps. Sometimes, during their missions, there is collateral damage.

After one of these days, Bruce sits down across from her at the little wooden table in her kitchen. It’s incongruous amongst the shining, never-used appliances and polished marble countertops. Bruce settles his elbows on the table. He bites his lip, takes a breath like he’s not sure of the words he’s about to say.

“Would you kill me if you had to? I mean if there were lives at stake,” he asks finally, his words a little too fast.

She knows why he’s asking her. The rest of the team thinks of her as the ruthless one, the scary one, the killer of men. They’re all heroes, but she’s an ex-assassin. No amount of heroism washes that away.

“It would never come to that,” is all she says. 

“Natasha,” he says, gently chiding, “if it were just the two of us and I was far gone, even you wouldn’t be able to stop me without killing me.”

“I’m not being overconfident,” she says. “It’s not myself I believe in. It’s you.” She pauses. “You’d never let that happen,” she says. Bruce is…maybe the most innocent person she knows. Maybe one of the strongest. If anyone could control the uncontrollable, if anyone could stop the Hulk and save the guiltless, it would be Bruce. 

She doesn’t put her hand on his, like she wants to, or tell him that he’s done great things, or reassure him a thousand times that he’s not a monster, but still, still, the moment is a little too intimate, a little too scary, and Natasha runs from it as fast as she can. 

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Winter crumbles into spring, and as they approach the team’s one-year anniversary, not that Natasha is planning on celebrating. She doesn’t like tracking time lately. The last couple of birthdays have snuck up on her. Still, the approaching date makes her remember how far they’ve all come: Clint, who was so cagey after what happened with Loki that it was months before he stopped sitting with his back to the wall and his eyes on the exit; Thor, who now navigates human society and politics with a grace that Fury wishes the rest of the team shared; Steve, who if he will always mourn for a time gone by has at least learned to live in this one; Tony, who is still an impossible asshole but is making admirable strides in becoming a better person; and Bruce, who’s practiced anger management so long and so well that, on a cloudy, puddle-filled day, he actually fails to Hulk out in the prep for a fight. Natasha responds to this sensibly by slapping him across the face hard enough that he falls backwards, going green before he hits the ground.

He thanks her, later.

This happens for a second time two and a half months later because Bruce is blissed out on the Xanax-plus their villain-of-the-week somehow managed to dose him with. It’s clever, and nonlethal, which worries Natasha. She always makes a particular point to be paranoid around those that specifically try not to kill them—there are so many things worse than death, after all.

“I had sex with Betty!” Tony shouts over the comms, in some desperation. His propulsion systems are offline and he’s dodging attacks on foot with only moderate success. 

“I know you’re not serious,” Bruce tells him gravely, before dissolving into drug-induced euphoria. 

Natasha sighs softly to herself. They need another heavy hitter on this mission—she, Clint, and Steve are barely denting the robot. It’s not large, as these things go, but it has some sort of shielding that protects it from all but the strongest attacks. The evacuation only started a half hour ago, and civilians are distressingly close. They need this thing done and they need it done fast. She switches off her comm. 

“Bruce,” she says, snapping her fingers to make sure she has his attention. “Do you remember when you were hiding out in India?”

“Yes,” he says, woozy. 

“Good, this is important.” She crouches down so she’s at his level. “You need to know, when they sent me in it wasn’t to bring you in, it was to evaluate you. I reported that you were in control, you weren’t a danger to anyone.” He’d been helping people. He’d been more or less happy. He’d finally gotten the hang of life on the run, enough so that it was unlikely anyone else would have bothered him. “We could have just left you there,” she says, and pauses. This part is hard. “Fury left the decision up to me. So I brought you in. I wanted you for the team and it was selfish,” she says, looking up into his eyes. “It was me, Bruce. I took away your shot at a normal life.”

There’s an aching pause, and then Bruce Hulks out in something like slow motion. Natasha backflips out of his reach and leads him towards the robot with the ease of long practice. It’s so distracting she almost doesn’t notice the tight place in her chest. 

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

On the ride home, Natasha and Bruce don’t talk. She tries to catch his eye, but he won’t even look at her. Natasha doesn’t push it. She knows from experience that when Bruce is upset it’s best to give him his space to deal with it. She’s no longer reflexively worried by his anger, just reasonably cautious. Bruce will talk to her when he’s ready. He’s actually a bit of a relief, a man who likes to talk. It’s a change from the repressed alpha males she’s used to. 

They have three days: three days of silence during meals, of avoidance, of words unsaid before he’s finally ready.

“Was it true?” he asks.

“Yes. But you already knew that.”

“You should have lied,” he says, and meets her gaze for the first time in days.

Natasha’s eyes flicker away, not wanting to see. “You deserved to know.” There’s a silence again, and Natasha pretends not to feel the prickling of it. 

“I forgive you,” he says, all in a rush. Like she’s leaving, like he needs to say it now.

“Now who’s lying?” she asks him, and smiles gently. “It’s okay, you don’t have to.”

“I will, though,” he says, and it has the sound of a promise. “I’m working on it.”

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

In mid-September, the Avengers have a mission in Helsinki that goes every kind of sideways, which wouldn’t be unusual, except that it’s the kind of sideways where innocent people die. 

So the day they come back is a bad day, the kind of bad day that makes Natasha recall, with unwelcome clarity, every single person she can remember killing. It’s a long list, and the hardest part of having to examine it is knowing that it’s only the redacted version. 

The rest of the team sensed her disquiet, but didn’t quite have the courage to say anything, not with the way she glared at them when they opened their mouths. They split up when they make it to the Tower, each to deal as they deal best. 

Except Bruce, who doesn’t really remember what went down and doesn’t particularly want to ask for the details. He wordlessly follows Natasha to the kitchen she never uses and brews coffee as Natasha sits down at the table. He sits down across from her, and doesn’t say a word as she watches the coffee he gave her grow cold. She looks angry, but Bruce suspects that doesn’t reflect her actual emotional state.

It was a hard day for the rest of the team, but worst for Natasha, who had to be ruthless. Who had to do evil in order to do good.

He remembers, acutely, a day not very long ago, when they sat at this table and Natasha covered his hand with hers and told him he was a better person than he thinks. 

He covers her hand with his own and doesn’t say, ‘So are you.’ 

He’s pretty sure she understands.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Here is how it happens: Bruce looks at Natasha and sees that she is the truest friend he has ever had, no exaggeration. Bruce looks at her and doesn’t understand how he ever hated her.

Bruce sees her and realizes he has loved her for a while.

Here is how it happens: one night he realizes they’re all alone and the lights of the city spread out below them are a little too beautiful. There’s music playing softly from hidden speakers, and the whole scene is just a little too romantic.

Bruce clears his throat awkwardly. “I should go,” he says, but there’s a tiny catch in his voice, a too obvious want under all that masochism and denial.

It’s impossible to hide anything from Natasha. “Stay,” she asks, like it’s an experiment. Like she’s curious.

“No, I really should leave,” he says, surer now.

Something on Natasha’s face flickers. “I’d really like it if you stayed,” Natasha says, only this time she sounds like she means it. She sounds a little lonely. A tiny bit vulnerable.

The thing about Natasha is, you will go crazy if you imagine that she is lying just because she could be lying. You will drive yourself nuts trying to find a way to get the truth from her (Tony had: he’d set up facial micro-expression reading software, special sensors to track blood flow and heart rate, and he’d gotten worse than squat, because she’d managed to lure him into a self-feeding cycle of paranoia). So at a certain point, you have to believe her. 

At a certain point, you have to trust her.

At a certain point, you just have to kiss her, and hope—


	3. Chapter 3

She moves an inch at a time, agonizingly slow. Bruce fights the urge to buck up, flip over, end this fast and hard. She smirks at him, pushes down on his shoulders with the heels of her hands. Her nails bite into his skin—tiny, delicious pinpricks. 

“You’re killing me,” he says, and she bites her lip, sinks back down onto him. She leans down and forward to kiss him, and he slides his hands up from her hips to her back and the full curve of her breast. She hums as his thumb circles her nipple, and relaxes her hold on him. Soon, Bruce thinks, they’ll give up this maddening slowness and fuck frantically like teenagers, coming so fast it leaves them gasping. 

There’s a quick knock at the door, booming in the quiet, and Bruce is suddenly cold. He blinks, and slowly processes that someone is at his door and Natasha has rolled off him and ducked behind the other side of the bed, taking most of the blanket with her. 

Bruce tugs at it, and she lets him take enough to cover himself. “What is it?” he calls out peevishly, hoping it’s unimportant and that they’ll go away. 

The door snaps open, and Steve peers into the room. He frowns at Bruce, sweaty, disheveled, obviously naked under the blanket, but says only “We’ve got an emergency. Be ready on the roof in five.” He moves to leave, but then Natasha’s cell phone goes off, blaring the emergency tone.

Natasha pops her head up over the side of the bed. “Problem, captain?” she asks, narrowing her eyes. And apparently it really is that easy to make him blush, because he goes red in seconds and slams the door so quickly it blurs. 

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Bruce looks comically surprised when he enters the office to find Natasha lounging in a chair. “I thought this meeting was about SHIELD policy,” he says to Fury.

“It is,” the director confirms. “Specifically, our anti-fraternization policy.” Bruce’s face shifts rapidly between half a dozen emotions, and finally he shoots a look at Natasha like he hope she’ll rescue him. 

“Please, director,” she says, voice bored, “we’re a little beyond that, don’t you think?” SHIELD policy calls for transfer of the lower-ranking member if a couple refuses to terminate their relationship, but Fury would never move Bruce off the Avengers. 

“The policy exists for a reason,” he starts.

“And if you intend to enforce it you have a serious problem brewing, what with—”

He raises a hand to cut her off. “If I don’t know about it I don’t have to deal with it,” he says. “And you’re right, I won’t push this. You’re both adults, what you do on your own time is your business. But if it becomes an issue I will break up the team, Agent Romanov. You know I’d prefer it if you were more mobile.”

“It won’t be a problem,” Bruce says.

“Good. Now save me a headache and tell the rest of the team.”

“Of course,” Bruce says, the same moment Natasha says “No.” They look at each other. 

“You don’t want anyone to know?” Bruce asks, sounding hurt. 

“It’s none of their business!” she hisses. 

“Well, I see the two of you have things to discuss,” Fury says. “That’ll be all for now.”

They leave, and Natasha pulls Bruce by the elbow into the conference room next door. “Out,” she tells the five agents inside, who trip over each other in their rush to leave. 

“Why does everybody have to know?” she asks. “Why can’t we just have this?”

“I just want to tell our friends, Natasha, not People magazine. What’s your objection?”

Natasha grimaces, and tries to think of a counter-argument that’s doesn’t insult the integrity, secret-keeping ability, or trustworthiness of their teammates. “You don’t think it’s a little soon?” she asks, finally.

He shrugs a shoulder. They live and work very closely with these people, keeping a secret of any magnitude from them is, for him, exhausting. And he doesn’t see any reason for the subterfuge. 

She frowns. The idea is distasteful; she finds herself squirming at the thought that everyone will find out about something that is just hers, not SHIELD’s or the Avengers’. Hers.

“We’ll talk about this later,” she says. She’s got a meeting with Agent Zhang about the Ellison-Hancock case.

Their argument goes on for four days, mostly because Natasha is stubborn and refuses to admit she might be wrong. Bruce doesn’t push too hard, because he knows secrecy is etched into her bones. He knows she hates giving anything up if she doesn’t have to.

No one else knows what’s going on, but they all sense the tension, can’t help but notice that Bruce and Natasha are holding angry, whispered conversations in snatched moments. Silences are uneasy, and Bruce for once understands Fury’s point of view: a couple really can fuck up a team.

Jesus, they’ve upset a team dynamic they spent over a year building with just a domestic squabble of breathtaking banality. 

After four days of this strain, Natasha walks into the communal kitchen one morning, perches on one of the barstools at the island, takes a bite of whole wheat toast, and says, “I’m sleeping with Bruce.”

Tony chokes on his eggs. Bruce nearly drops his spoon in his cereal, equally surprised. Thor grins like it’s his birthday and offers them a congratulations filled with more sincerity than most people have in a whole week. Tony finishes coughing and opens his mouth, to which Clint says only, “Don’t,” and then leaves the room. Natasha doesn’t watch him go and Bruce thinks he has perhaps missed something. He dwells, for a brief moment, on the fact that Natasha never discloses secrets unless she has to. 

Tony twists his mouth, and they can practically see him swallow his words. In the time the team has cohabited, he’s learned that his teammates are not only violent, they’re also surprisingly petty. It’s better not to anger them unduly. 

Instead he seals his lips, and delicately gives Bruce a slow-motion high-five. 

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Clint is not okay, and Natasha should probably talk to him. Natasha probably fucked things up. She wasn’t sure how to…she should have handled it better, somehow. 

For days he barely talks to her. She’ll walk into a room and all the sudden he needs to leave. She’ll ask him for intel and she’ll get nothing more than what she asked for, no sarcasm or awful puns. She’s hurt, and angry that he’s made her the bad guy in all of this. That was years ago, she’d thought he was over it.

When they get assigned on a mission together, she decides she’ll take it as an opportunity. It used to be the two of them partnered all the time, but these days they tend to be either solo or with the whole team. She means to say something to him while on the jet to Capetown, but Agent Sitwell had been with them the whole time, briefing them urgently, like taking down an AIM satellite base isn’t the kind of thing the two of them are capable of in their sleep. 

They rappel down from the helicopter to the roof. Natasha unhooks the line, triple-checks her gear. The unmarked bird whirrs away; it’ll pick them up at the extraction point. She takes her spot by the door. “Time?” she asks Clint. Synchrony is very important here. Opening the door triggers the alarm, they have to wait until the base security is distracted by the SHIELD raid. 

“T-minus two minutes,” he says, and then surprises her by turning around and saying, “Do you ever think, that you and me could’ve, you know—”

She shoots him an incredulous look. “Do you really think this is the time?”

“Sure,” he says. “Nobody else here.” 

He looks at her like he still expects an answer, so finally she sighs and says, “Let me ask you a question, Clint. Did you ever trust me back then?”

“Would you have respected me if I had?” he counters. “I just want to know. You told me,” he grimaces, no one hates dwelling on the past more than Clint, “you told me that you were done with loving people. So I’m left wondering, was that just a line, or—”

“What do you want from me, Clint? I was wrong.”

His face moves like he’s startled by that answer. “So it’s real deal then?” he asks, in a totally different tone.

She gives him the side eye like she’s not sure if he’s pulling something. “Yes,” she says. “You think I’d risk this team if I was just fucking around?”

“I’m starting to feel like I didn’t know you as well as I thought.”

She bites her tongue. “Clint—”

“Later, Tasha, we’ve got work to do,” he says, drawing an arrow from his quiver.

“You’re the one that started it!” she says, indignant, and opens the door. There’s an AIM foot soldier at the bottom of the flight of stairs, and she punches him right in the face, cleanly breaking his nose. It makes her feel a little bit better. 

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

As Halloween approaches, the Tower empties. Thor takes Jane to visit Asgard, Tony heads to Japan for an annual technology tradeshow (“Geek Christmas!”), Clint’s off on a mission, and as a result the Tower is unwontedly quiet. Natasha’s not enjoying it as much as Bruce would have expected. 

Clint’s mission is top-secret, no one besides Natasha is cleared to know about it. Bruce and Steve know better than to ask—if she answers, as she sometimes does, her response will only serve to keep them up at night. Natasha was scheduled to go with Clint, but she broke her collarbone after taking a fall from the third story of a burning building. 

She’s not too happy about it, from the intensity of the attention she’s giving the Korean drama playing on the television.

“Hey,” Bruce says. He doesn’t know if she wishes she were with Clint right now. If she worries about him. He suspects she wouldn’t give him a straight answer if he asked, so he carefully sits next to her on the couch, mindful of her injury.

She wordlessly switches on the subtitles so he can follow the plot, and they settle in watch. 

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Clint comes back with a wicked sunburn and sealed lips, and Tony returns a few days later with three of his competitors’ prototypes and a renewed inability to shut up. He’s so full of ideas he stays locked in his workshop for days. 

The doctors clear Natasha for fieldwork again and she waits with some anxiety for their next mission. She doesn’t like it when things are too quiet; it makes her think someone is planning something. 

Her paranoia is justified four days later when the security she so carefully vetted is breached. This pisses her off almost as much as armed men storming her bedroom.

They’re more lightly geared than she would have expected, with matching guns and all-black outfits, but no body armor or other weapons or equipment. Presumably, they thought they’d catch her asleep.

But Natasha’s not that easy to kill. 

She’s awake and moving before they’re all the way into the room. She breaks the first guy’s arm, tazes the second, kicks the third unconscious. First guy comes back and he gets the garrote. Number four she punches in the throat, number five she chokes out. If these were all of them, she would be out of trouble. But a dozen more are rushing in, and it is impossible to know how many more are outside.

That’s when she gets a chill. That’s when she realizes there are too many for her. She is the Black Widow: legendary, but only human. 

There are some battles she cannot win.

Natasha does the cowardly, sensible thing she has been trained to do. It’s instinct, really: all her moments of recklessness have been learned. She fights her way out of her room, and slips away from her chasers with ease. 

The house lights are on, so the night feels almost normal. If Natasha closes her ears and ignores the fact that she is embroiled in a fight for her life, she can almost pretend her home was not invaded. Natasha squeezes her hand into a fist. She is not in the business of ignoring truths, of uselessly wishing, of letting insults go unpunished. 

She spares a second to glance out the windows, watching traffic glide along, all unknowing. 

When Tony was making repairs to the Tower after the Battle of New York, he decided to renovate the upper floors before giving them over to the Avengers. The windows were retrofitted with specially made windows, shatterproof, bulletproof, and treated for privacy so that no one outside can see in. The walls were reinforced: she can’t safely blow through them with the gear that she keeps on-site. 

The size of her floor gives her enough breathing room to grab the go bag she keeps in the living room. She zips into her tac suit in the linen closet, ignoring the heavy footfalls outside. From the fight, she knows that their hand-to-hand combat training was not extensive. From the noise they make, she knows they aren’t trained for stealth, either. She double-checks her weaponry, and slams the door open hard enough to stun the guy outside. She stomps down on his stomach, hard, and as he retches she shoots open the air vent.

Damn, Clint was right. These do come in useful. 

She takes the ducts to the security room, where she finds Clint watching the feeds from the cameras. They’d gotten a better drop on him: he sports a shallow cut along his forearm and only made it out with a single bag containing his collapsible bow and a small quiver.

“I couldn’t get to any of my gear,” he says, explaining the T-shirt and pajama pants he’s currently sporting. Natasha doesn’t really think there’s any excuse for wearing a shirt with a picture of your own face.

“Don’t get shot,” she says, eyes on the fabric, and then turns away to look at the footage he’d been watching. The two of them only have to watch for a few minutes to confirm that they’re the only two left un-captured. Tony is unconscious in his bed under heavy guard. Bruce is handcuffed to his bed, looking dazed. Clint confirms her suspicion that he’s been drugged. Steve is nowhere in sight, but security logs show him leaving hours ago. Lately he’s developed a habit of nighttime walks followed by early morning marathons, no help is coming from that front.

“They got Stark in his room, told Banner they’d put a bullet in his head if he didn’t contain himself,” Clint tells her. Stark. Banner. Clint is falling back into old patterns. It’s a bad sign, as these things go. “JARVIS is down,” he continues. “Some kind of virus. But it looks like he triggered full lockdown first. I’m not sure who cut off communications.”

In the case of a security breach, the upper floors of the Tower seal themselves off. It’s a failsafe meant to protect the civilians in the floors beneath them, but one that means the cavalry isn’t coming until dawn at least. For now, it is just the two of them. 

“Just like old times,” Clint says, and strings his bow.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Using the intel from the cameras and their familiarity with the Tower, the two of them successfully ambush two six-men squads. They leave them zip-tied and gagged in the spare bedroom on Clint’s floor and Steve’s walk-in closet, respectively, and they begin to think that the two of them can do this. But there’s little room to use the bow and Clint’s always been shit at close quarters, so it’s not a huge surprise that on their third ambush Clint gets his right hand broken trying to take down two men at once. 

“Fuck!” he screams, more in rage than in pain. He punches the guy out left-handed, and uses his now-useless bow to swat the second man in the face, providing enough of a distraction that he can get him into Nat’s favorite sleeper hold: the one that squeezes the windpipe between the knees, no hands required. While he chokes him out, Natasha uses her penultimate tranquilizer to bring down the last man standing. “Shit!” Clint yells, redundantly, and kicks one of Natasha’s felled opponents in the ribs. With an expression of deep and abiding unhappiness, he pulls the gun from the guy’s holster. 

“Are you done?” Natasha asks. 

“Yeah,” Clint says, “you got any tape?”

He’s too used to the grind of broken bones to bitch as he tapes it up, but he swears again when he test fires the gun and nothing happens. A little light near the trigger shines red. 

“Probably a fingerprint lock,” Natasha points out. 

“This pisses me the hell off,” he says, and accepts the weapons she hands him. Unless they feel like backtracking to their floors, all the weapons they have are those they carry. And time is of the essence, if they don’t want their opponents to regroup, or worse, cut their losses by killing their captives.

We need go bags and weapons caches on every floor, Natasha thinks. That they didn’t have them already was clearly an oversight.

They head for Bruce’s quarters first in an unspoken agreement. In taking out the men they run into on the way Clint spends all of Natasha’s throwing stars and abandons them, not wanting to take the time retrieve them. For the guards, he uses her knife. 

There are five guards in Bruce’s bedroom. Clint takes the two on the right, Natasha the three on the left. That’s the way they used to divide their opponents, in the old days. Natasha always took the lion’s share. 

The fight is brief. These guys are just meat, and the look in their eyes says they know it.

Natasha drops the second-to-last guard, turns around to see the last holding one his handgun to Bruce’s chest, and knows whatever she does it will come too late.

The guard spares her a single, panicked glance, and then shoots Bruce straight through the chest.

Natasha screams. Natasha, if she were like Bruce, would have lost it, would have turned green and destroyed everything.

Natasha is Natasha. Natasha takes out that man with her knife, sprays his arterial blood across the walls and thinks that she won’t regret it even a little. 

Clint gets to Bruce first. He’s groggy, mind and vision still obscured by a horse-dose of tranquilizer. At least, Natasha tries to console herself, it means he isn’t feeling this. Clint applies pressure to the wound, says, “Stay with me,” like just asking it will be enough. 

The house is on lockdown. They still have hostiles in the building. No one outside even knows they’re in trouble. Just asking won’t be enough.

Natasha has lost people before. Natasha has lost men she loved before. It always hurts like this. It always feels this unfair. 

From the hall comes the sound of stomping boots. 

“Get them,” Clint says. She protests. “I can’t,” Clint says, and it’s reasonable, even if he says it in that hard tone. He’s injured and basically weaponless; it would be a death sentence even for someone with Clint’s skills.

She wonders if Clint knows what he’s asking of her, and sees by the hardness of his face that he does. 

She squeezes Bruce’s hand once, kisses him swiftly, then runs towards the hallway. They tell the story of Orpheus for a reason: she knows better than to look back. 

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Natasha spins. She ducks, and kicks. She hits and throws and altogether loses herself in the familiar rhythm of battle. She’s strong and fast and vicious and deadly. And losing. Three of her opponents are down, but many more are coming. She has to hold the door—no other options—so she throws out all that she’s been holding back. There are too many opponents, and she’s too close to being pinned down, so she uses up her last tricks, her last resorts. She discharges the last of the Widow’s Bites, depletes her canister of mace, dislocates her shoulder sliding out from a hold. She rips abdominal muscles jumping back up from a fall, bruises her ribs hitting a wall. 

She wonders if they’ll kill her, too, when the Hulk bursts through the wall.

Oh, Clint, clever, ruthless Clint. Put Natasha in danger and even a drugged Bruce will get angry. And if Bruce transforms a life-threatening injury is just a scratch.

Natasha collapses in gratitude and exhaustion. Natasha knows her limits. She worked alone for so long, she had to know what precisely she could and could not do. So it was obvious to her, the second she took on more than she could handle. Natasha props herself up against a wall, watches the Hulk devastate their enemies through dulled eyes. Clint steps delicately through the hole in the wall, pulls her last knife from her hand and stands in front of her in a clearly protective stance.

“Thank you,” she says, and closes her eyes, tired down to the marrow of her bones.

Only ten minutes later it’s all over. Once the Hulk made his appearance, the remaining invaders were only too happy to surrender. Clint got communications back online and switched off the lockdown. He called SHIELD and a clean-up crew and a medical team are on their way. Out of enemies, the Hulk winds down. He looks at Natasha in worry, still slumped against the wall. The bright green of his eyes fades into a warm, familiar brown.

“My turn,” Natasha says, and stands, though her muscles protest. She’d popped her screaming shoulder back into the socket earlier, and now it’s nothing more than a familiar ache. Clint sits, grateful, and then jumps back up when he realizes what she means. 

“Natasha,” he warns.

“Relax,” she says. “It’s hardly the first time.” He lets her take her knife from his hand, but looks deeply uncertain.

“Be careful,” he says.

“Always,” she answers, and gives him a weak half-smile. That’s usually her line.

Natasha walks up to the Hulk, and calmly throws a piece of rubble at him. His expression slowly changes to confusion. “You were never our friend,” she says, and he growls. “Get out. You don’t belong here,” she says, more loudly. Green kindles in his eyes.

He steps forward, not quite convinced. She picks up one of the invaders’ useless guns and points it at him. “Get out of here!” she yells.

Come on, she whispers to herself, and breathes out a sigh of relief when he lunges. She handsprings backwards and dives around a corner. In this manner she draws him away from Clint and Tony, using the walls and furniture of the house to her advantage, staying half hidden and always out of reach. Even the Hulk must sense this isn’t a real fight because he’s uncharacteristically sluggish. He’s always been too fast for something so big and powerful. And Natasha is way too slow, too injured and tired, but she knows the way the Hulk fights. She knows the minutiae of his anger: knows to keep him frustrated but not enraged.

She knows this building, too, knows which walls are reinforced and what’s waiting behind every door. It’s an advantage the Hulk doesn’t have, not with the way he goes blind with rage. 

She needs it, not just to stay alive. She doesn’t, after all, believe the Hulk would hurt her.

She needs it because if she stops fighting he’ll calm down, and promptly bleed to death. The wound that was just a scratch to the Hulk will still be deadly to Bruce, and Natasha won’t play his life against the speed of SHIELD’s medical response team. So instead she buys time, tries to walk the fine line between Bruce’s death and hers.

When Natasha hears Fury’s voice over the intercom, she sighs with the kind of relief only the nearness of death can teach you. “Stand down, Agent Romanov,” Fury says, “we have a medical team on standby.”

“Yes, sir,” she says, even though he can’t hear her, and then uses every ounce of her training to disappear so thoroughly the Hulk can’t find her. She pulls one of Clint’s scopes from her kit and turns the dial all the way to the left. Through it she watches as the Hulk slowly stills. All at once, he collapses into Bruce, who immediately starts pouring blood. EMTs rush in like ants, and Natasha shakily puts the scope away, unwedges herself from her hidey-hole. Caught with the image of Bruce bleeding, she has to remind herself that medical technology is basically miraculous these days, especially SHIELD’s. Bruce will live, she tells herself. It won’t be like it was with Ilya, who bled out over days as the doctors failed to find the leaking vein, or Anton, who died of fever after a bullet graze.

Today all her friends live.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

She finds Clint in the common room, arguing with a medical technician about whether the cut on his forehead needs stitches. When he sees her approach, he waves the woman away. She gives him a dirty look as she leaves. “They’re going to write you up for noncompliance again,” Natasha says.

“Mother hens,” Clint says dismissively. “I’m surprised they let you walk around.”

“I’m fine. Both of us will be,” she adds. “Thank you.”

Clint glances away, awkward. “Bruce was the one to do all the heavy lifting,” he says. 

“You know what I mean,” she says. Anyone else would have held the door with her; and she would have been fine and Bruce would have died. No one else knows her like Clint, and Natasha feels, for the first time, a little crush of regret. She wonders if this is what he has been feeling, if this was why he’s been so prickly lately. It does hurt. “Thank you for saving him,” she repeats, and all the weight behind the words visibly makes him uncomfortable.

Sitwell passes by, and Clint jumps on the distraction. “Hey, you ever find out what all this was about?” he asks. God forbid they discuss their actual emotions.

“We got a call from the Captain,” Sitwell says, “a team jumped him downtown last night. This whole thing was probably just to stop you guys from getting called in as backup.”

“I was wondering where he was,” Natasha says. “Is he okay?”

“His knuckles might be a little sore,” Sitwell answers, smirking.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Natasha perches on the uncomfortable hospital chair, watching Bruce with that single-minded focus that makes her so dangerous. With her slightly narrowed eyes and minute frown, she looks less like a concerned loved one and more like a person deeply irked at the fragility of the human form. 

“I thought you were going to die,” she says when he wakes up.

It takes him a moment to respond, disoriented by the new surroundings and addled by the drugs.

“Oh. Me too,” he answers. “Why aren’t I?”

“Clint. He said something to you, do you remember?”

Bruce thinks back for a moment. His memories are fuzzier than usual, thanks to the cocktail their home invaders—now definitively ID’ed as AIM—had dosed him with. “Should I get him a card?” he asks finally. 

“Probably not,” she says.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Bruce says, fiddling with his IV. “About Clint—”

“We were over a long time ago,” Natasha says. “He gets that.”

While Bruce was in surgery, Clint apologized to her. Clint never apologizes. He said he’d been an asshole, and that he wanted her to be happy. The worst part was Natasha was sure that he meant it.

Natasha had…

Natasha had wanted to put her hand on his face and hold him like she used to. Natasha wants him to be happy, too. She doesn’t like this feeling that she is losing him all over again. “It’s all right,” she’d said to him, but the words had also meant ‘I’m sorry.’ And for all that she wishes they hadn’t, they’d also meant ‘goodbye.’

They’re contemplative for a bit, and then Natasha asks Bruce how he feels. She’s mostly healed-up, but her altered metabolism lets her heal just slightly faster than he does, and his injuries were so much more severe. 

“It was just a little thoracic surgery,” he says, and scoots over with a wince. “Want to watch terrible daytime television with me?”

“We’re in public,” she points out.

“What, you guys haven’t secured the site?”

Natasha frowns a little, because PDA makes her itchy, from a security standpoint. But he’s right, this wing of the hospital is on lockdown. No one is around but SHIELD personnel. And once she gets on the narrow bed and leans against him it’s nice. She relaxes. The battle’s over and they’re both okay, and that’s more than you get, some days. That’s enough to celebrate. 

There are moments, Natasha has learned—and this is hard-earned knowledge, this is something she started learning on a battlefield seventy years ago—that are perfect. They are often the smallest of things, little snatches of beauty and love. And when these moments come, you accept them with grace, without fear of their ending. You hold them close to your heart, stock them up like wartime rations: a box full of sunshine for the winter.

When everything is hard, when you need it, when you feel like you can’t go on, you remember these moments.

So Natasha doesn’t say a word, just sits still and breathes and tries to etch every second into her memory. You only get so many moments, and she’s afraid that she’s burning through her allotted share. Or maybe that’s just what happiness feels like.


End file.
